Alleyman

“Bowling during the day is so decadent!” Paul Rudd said, gazing in wonder at Lucky Strike’s empty lanes. At night, the Hell’s Kitchen bowling alley is the kind of swinging joint where you might find Brian Fantana, the Oui-era Casanova whom Rudd reprises in “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.” Fantana, a mustachioed television correspondent who slathers on Sex Panther cologne and carries condoms for every mood, would surely have a mocha-colored bowling ensemble.

Rudd, not so much. The forty-four-year-old actor wore a flannel shirt, sported two-day stubble, and was scouring the place for a viable ball. “I had incredibly fat thumbs,” he explained, “so I always had the embarrassing thing of having to use the sixteen-pound ball. Later, I had thumb-reduction surgery, of course.” He finally secured a suitable house ball—helpfully labelled “House Ball”—and raised it in triumph.

At fourteen, in lieu of puberty, Rudd went through a bowling phase. “At my alley, King Louie West Lanes, in Kansas City, there was this glass case with photos of all the pro bowlers who’d been there—and I had never heard of any of them,” he said. “One was named Mike Limongello, which gave me endless amounts of pleasure.” He used his phone to spell-check the bowler’s name, and went, “Ooh . . .”; headlines told of Limongello’s being kidnapped, in 1982, by his cousin, a former major-league pitcher who spelled his name “Lemongello.” Rudd pocketed his phone with a frown—that anecdote went in a strange direction—and squeezed out some sanitizing lotion from a wall-mounted dispenser. “Every bowling ball is filled with human excrement,” he explained. “People pick their ass and then bowl. It’s very common.”

Ready at last, he stepped up and knocked down eight pins, then converted a tricky 2-8 spare. “Classic Limongello!” he cried. He followed that with a ringing strike, but critiqued the anxious way he’d watched the pins scatter, saying, “I should have turned and walked away, like people do in films when they’ve timed an explosion to go off.”

After the strong start, Rudd’s game began to wobble. There was even a gutter ball. He explained the technique that had produced it: “I go with the rigidly straight arm, so I can bounce the ball on the lane before I release it, which preserves the randomness. I find it also helps to keep the front leg locked and the back leg really tight to my body, taking any suppleness out of the motion.” He actually had some back-leg action, but it wasn’t a stylish upkick so much as the scuffle you make to scrape gum off your shoe.

Rudd hosts an annual fund-raiser at Lucky Strike for children who stutter—just because he admires kids who persevere through the issue. That sort of friend-to-the-situation optimism can also be seen in a YouTube video in which a college-age Rudd makes a cameo as an affable bat-mitzvah d.j., representing an outfit called You Should Be Dancing. He said that seeing the old footage—his matted gull wings of hair; his canary-colored dinner jacket, black shorts, and Pittsburgh Steelers cap; his introspective air guitar to “Hound Dog”—“was like watching myself in a porno.” The d.j.-ing phase didn’t follow inevitably from the bowling phase, he insisted, yet he acknowledged that “it’s hard to say which outweighs the other on the nerdiness scale.”

Rudd’s Everyman appeal—his ability to seem at once engagingly nerdy and unthreateningly handsome—has got him cast as men named Ned, Tim, Danny, Chuck, Pete, and, repeatedly, as John, Paul, and George. (No Ringo.) “Character names are a real art, and I haven’t had many snazzy ones,” he said, settling on a sofa after a run of open frames. “In ‘Anchorman,’ because names are a huge part of real anchormen’s personas, the fake anchor names have to be just right. ‘Ron Burgundy’ ”—Will Ferrell’s character—“is perfect: the ‘Burgundy’ suggesting a rich, professional, Naugahyde feel, and ‘Ron’ having just the right amount of machismo. And, for me, playing a Brian is pretty standard, but the ‘Fantana’ has something nicely cocksure about it. You sense that he imagines himself as rather exotic, as having the authentic Latin-American flair of a Tony Orlando. You picture small colored briefs.”

Still, Rudd said he’d love to play characters with even sexier, more dangerous names. Such as? “Enzo. Daze. Daze with two ‘a’ s—D-a-a-z-e. Flarn. If they wanted me to play him, his name would probably be George Flarn, but he might go by Flarn.” He propped his rented shoes on the table. “And Limongello, of course.” ♦